Autori: Leva A, Vallerotonda R, De Santis D, Armenia S
Editore: BSLab
Tipologia Prodotto: Contributo in volume
Titolo del Volume: A cura di: Francesco Caputo, 4th Business Systems Laboratory International Symposium “Governing Business Systems” – Theories and Challenges for Systems Thinking in Practice
Numero prima e ultima pagina: 100 – 101
ISBN: 9788890824234
Anno di Pubblicazione: 2016
Abstract:
We present a system dynamics model, based on a judicial decision concerning a fatal accident at work, and an experiment performed using it. With a preventional view, our aim is to go beyond the criminal liability and to address the matter of safe behavior and safety culture. Our working group deals with occupational safety and health within the Italian Workers’ Compensation Authority and creates researches and tools in order to help companies implementing prevention and to facilitate training. Our ultimate objective is the prevention of accidents. The model also investigates behaviors, since the court process we refer to is focused on it as well as on criminal responsibility, and it’s a didactical tool. In the courses we have been organizing for some time now, some case studies on processes and court decisions are discussed. This kind of training often has the primary goal to teach the duties, the responsibilities and the possible sanctions provided by law. However, it should also promote safe behavior and independent risk assessments. As a consequence, we presently introduce a business game built on our model that handles the “tale” of the relevant facts, the responsibility and the logical path that led to the judgment, but that also tries to identify the main mechanisms that can lead to the occurrence of incidents and accidents in situations similar to those given in the specific court proceedings. Considering the goals, we have followed closely the prescription to model a single issue, in the simplest possible way; moreover, the model does not analyze the economic aspects and the cause-effect relationships that affect them. In contrast, one of our previous products highlighted the potential economic benefits for individual companies of its interventions regarding safety at work. In fact, we wanted to highlight two factors clearly emerging from the sentence we refer to: the behavior of the workers and the communication flows. On top of them, there are also other factors such as the status of the plants, the level of safety and, more generally, the culture of safety. We therefore focused on these aspects and considered the situation in which a micro enterprise provides a maintenance service to a small business, generalizing the circumstances reported by the court judgement; in such cases the corporate structure is minimized and many elements that would be useful to consider for large companies lose their importance. We considered incidents and accidents from a probabilistic point of view: the factors we have contemplated act on the likelihood of such events or (once they occur) on their severity. This does not mean that we carried out stochastic simulations, but that two variables of the model are respectively constituted by the likelihood of incidents and the risk of accidents, while remaining within the framework of a deterministic simulations. For the measurements of variables, we used the literature that deals with occupational safety and health. For example, the safety culture of a company is calculated from the answers that workers and managers give to the questions provided in some questionnaires. After making the necessary tests on the simulations, we implemented a basic business game; we built a rudimentary game dashboard and an elementary graphical interface with the Vensim® software and made the simulation “playable”, in order to perform an experiment on the educational use of the model. The experiment was implemented with the cooperation of privileged observers and colleagues who have voluntarily acted as teachers. It consisted of a meeting with a dual purpose: to verify the teaching effectiveness of the model and to observe the behavior and interaction between teachers and other participants. Several aspects to be considered arose. The contemporary transmission of system thinking and prevention of accidents and incidents in workplaces is difficult, but this task is simplified through the use of a tool realized for the purpose. In our case, it has been found out that the business game itself has made possible understand how the systemic vision can be applied to the matter of health and safety: beginning a teaching session with a theoretical approach has proved to be scarcely useful for training. We realized that the problem-solving kind of approach that the business game offers does not need to be preceded by theoretical teachings which, instead, must be provided during the session. The experiment showed that the model gives the chance to teach how to observe, with a global vision, the problems and the aspects related to the occupational safety and health and to associate many thematics which are often considered singularly. Courses that contemplate the use of our business game have already been scheduled (for which a graphical interface improvement is planned); in such courses other court judgments will be analyzed using the same model. Future developments also plan to implement other models from other judgments and to include in them information from existing databases in the field of health and safety at work.
Keywords: training, occupational safety and health, osh, system dynamics, simulation, occupational health and safety, ohs